From one who lost relatives murdered in concentration camps I thank you Ms. Marcus from the bottom of my heart for what you wrote. Now I urge you to join me in condemning with equal strength as I have done the vile use of Nazi/Hitler/Himmler/etc. similes by persons who posture as “progressives”, “left wingers”, or “liberals” as I have done and will continue to do on this website.
In fact, I wonder why you have not already attacked these pseudo “progressives”, “left wingers”, and “liberals”.

Alas! Just another reminder of the mindless and mean-spiritedness that oozes from the spleen of the creatures that inhabit the confederacy and their fellow travellers of the cancervative persuasion. The fact that trash like this gets publicity at all speaks to the extent to which this nation is rotting internally!

Black is white; up is down; war is peace; Homeland Security; War on Terror, Clear Skies Initiative, Healthy Forests, compassionate conservative…

Perception is reality and ours has been intensively stage-managed for a long time.  When the truth gets in the way of profits, we know which one wins. 

There are a few other inconvenient truths we really haven’t been paying attention to, in part because they have been actively hidden from us.  You’ve probably heard of some of them.  The fact that all of this is coming to a head in the near future is no accident- just the inevitable natural consequences of human behavior.  Check out, “Crash Course,” and Chis Martenson on Youtube.

Americans wouldn’t recognize a great leader if they tripped over him rushing into Walmart on Black Friday. Great leaders speak truth, and nothing is greater anathema to Americans across the political spectrum from conservative to liberal. I purposely distinguish liberals from leftists. If you voted for Obama, ignoring his cronies, you are a liberal.

diamond:  A really good comment, along with a number of other good comments.

Ruth Marcus said at the end:  “it is time for rational conservatives to speak up.” Will they?  Doubtful.  Why?
  My take is, the entire country has switched toward the right due to a decade or more of studious official governmental ignoring of facts. such as:
  War is counterproductive and a very limited, inadequate substitute for peaceful industries.
  Natioinal egotism is silly.
  A handful of “terrorists” from the Middle East cannot seriously effect the U.S. unless U.S. citizens shrivel up in fear and start reacting by sponsoring war, which leads to repression of civil rights and a vast accumulations of wealth in the hands of a few powerful corporations in charge of energy and weapons technologies.
  The majority of U.S. citizens have come to doubt these facts, which have long been granted without dispute by liberals generally.
Unfortunately, due to fears spread widely throughout our population, plus the recent crisis of capitalists’ mismanagement of the economy, liberals too are stymied by doubts and trapped by their own reactionary tendencies. Rather than propose any radical, creative, untested response they content themselves with criticizing Obama and each other.
  Obama is the primary victim of this tendency to react only, not to invent, not to experiment, not to organize for change.  A strong avant guarde would make a move for change possible.
  Let’s face it:  In general the American people were traumatized by McCarthyism and its long follow-on of suspicion and misunderstanding. Public education through schools and media has been woefully resistant to facts for fifty years or more.
One should not be surprised by the overall conservative/reactionary tendencies we see now in the face of threat and political disillusion.
  The truth is that a great leader is needed—but a great leader is all too often extremely dangerous.
I fervently hope that the people will organize themselves reasonably and take leadership intelligently, but I doubt that they will.

The problem is they’re not unhinged: they know exactly what they’re doing. They pretend to be anti-fascist but they are fascist through and through. I suppose a lot of people in Germany thought Hitler was really a socialist (Nazi was an abbreviation of National Socialist Party)but he never was and others certainly thought he was ‘unhinged’ and that his little party of backroom brawlers would never get anywhere. I have read parts of ‘Mein Kampf’ and what Hitler stressed in that book was that it was futile to appeal to the intellect of the working class, what he calls ‘the masses’. You had to appeal to their emotions and give them a myth to believe in. The tea party myth is that they are the political heirs to the forebears who threw the tea in Boston Harbour- dressed as Indians so the Indians would get the blame if it all went pear shaped. The Tea Partiers claim to have something in common with Tom Paine: they have absolutely nothing in common with Tom Paine. With Thomas Jefferson? Well, he was a slave owner who slept with a 13 year old black girl, kept her as a concubine and fathered eight children with her and never freed even his own mixed race children until he was on his death bed. With him, they have a lot in common -racism and hypocrisy for a start. But the section of the voters they’re pitching to will only hear the words, ‘Thomas Jefferson’, ‘Tea Party’, ‘socialism’, ‘democracy’ and many of them don’t have the faintest idea who Thomas Jefferson really was or how he really lived his life. They don’t have any real understanding of what socialism actually is either or what it aims to do, mostly for them.

A lot of people thought Hitler was a joke and in fact the Nazi party had very little support, around 2% of the vote but in politics deals can always be done, even deals with the devil. Such a deal with the establishment far right of German politics saw Mr. 2% installed as Chancellor. The idiots who put him there, thought they could control him but the German officer corps, fascists to a man, rallied to his cause, Hitler then suspended the constitution, after the Nazis lost ground in a by-election, and the rest is history. After that he never had to face the voters again and cheated the hangman by swallowing cynanide. Something similar to the Nazis rise and suspension of the constitution could happen if enough of these fascists get into the halls of political power in America. Voters should realize you can’t be a little bit pregnant, or a little bit fascist. These people are unofficially linked to the same far right that has taken over the Republican Party but they are strictly the Dick Cheney model: Dick’s motto was and is that once you get power all bets are off. They are indistinguishable from the Nazis in all but name so they need to show the concentration camps to pretend they are opposed to such things. They aren’t.

When you know you can’t win the argument with reason, you’d best go with
emotion. That’s been the conservative’s approach since Reagan (at least), and it
works like gangbusters. (They keep the actual gangbusters on the payroll, just
in case.)

Some favorite rhetorical tactics from the right:

1. The enemy is at the gates.
We are the best. Why else would all those heathens want us dead? And since
we’re the best, we must have the best heathen deterrence technology, no matter
what it costs. And anyway, what’s wrong with making a little profit in the name
of homeland security? Just lately, this one has taken the form of:

1b. The enemy walks among us.
Old fashioned sci-fi paranoia straight from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. You
must never sleep (i.e. think) because if you do, the pod people will come and
turn you into a plant (i.e. socialist).

2. Nostalgia for imaginary by-gone eras as code for cultural/racial supremacy.
Everything was so much better before we let those (other) huddled masses in,
with their chutneys and their pickled fish and their chipotle—oh wait a minute,
I like chipotle.

3. Exceptionalism masquerading as patriotism.
Anyone who thinks we’re not the fastest, strongest, brightest, richest, coolest
and overall ‘bestest’ can just go line up over there with those huddled masses
until we figure how to get rid of you in way that doesn’t make us look bad.

4. Bootstrapper Mythology as official stroker of the national ego.
Yes, go-getters (and you ARE all go-getters, right?), all the plums in this nation
of plenty are yours for the taking. So no whining, let’s just get it done!
Remember, fortune favors the brave, therefor the poor are a pack of sniveling
cowards.

5. Reductio Ad Hitlerum (yawn, even they don’t really believe this one).
It seems everybody and their brother knew Hitler was star material way before he
made it big. Maybe it’s time the crystal ball factory stopped making that model
with the hindsight feature. It just begs this kind of abuse.

6. Your favorite conservative rhetorical tactic here.

Elroy, thay’s what needs cutting worse than anything—the military. But I fear it won’t be cut until this country finally collapses economically and the money spigots are shut off for everybody.

Would Barber like to cut military spending as he would
Social Security? How about shutting down the VA - our most
Socialist of services? Should the rich continue to have
tax shelters and loopholes? Should the government get
Medicare off the people’s collective back?

He’s bobbing and weaving, but there are still some punches
he might not be able to duck.

“In Germany, when Hitler was first elected under the Socialist Party, no one would have thought in a million years it would have gone where it did.”

For so many, Hitler is the gift that just keeps on giving. Barber is either a fool or just plain ignorant to equate Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) party with socialism. He is fixated on a word and ignores the context. Is Barber unaware that Hitler abhorred socialism’s sympathy for the working class? Hitler despised Communism, liberalism, and democracy. Hitler’s thinking was more in line with Barber’s Tea Party than it would be with any kind of European-style social democracy that Barber fears could take hold in the USA.

That’s American big-party politics for you—and shows why this country needs a multitude of parties, not one Statist-War party masquerading as two.